Monday, June 27, 2016

Somebody's gonna be happy come November

Does it matter whether Hillary or Trump becomes President? (Sort of. Also Trump will not become President even though a lot of Hillary people are pretending there is a big scary threat of that happening.) It sure doesn't matter to some people.

The prospective Ryan-Schumer deal doesn’t have many details. But it
would change the law so that profits earned by U.S. multinationals
overseas, including the $2.4 trillion overseas now, would be taxed
whether or not they were brought back to the U.S. — while also radically
reducing the tax rate on those overseas profits. This would essentially
make the 2004 tax holiday permanent. That’s why Sen. Elizabeth Warren,
D-Mass., has called such plans “a giant wet kiss for the tax dodgers.”
Trump’s official tax plan would do exactly the same thing. His ally, billionaire corporate raider Carl Icahn, has pledged to fund a Super PAC with $150 million to make it happen.

In the short run, both Trump’s plan and the Ryan-Schumer framework
would provide a burst of tax revenue from the money collected on the
$2.4 trillion currently overseas. In the long run they
would significantly reduce U.S. taxes on multinationals. They would
also, if they instituted lower tax rates for overseas profits than for
those earned in the U.S., provide an even greater incentive for big
corporations to use accounting shenanigans to appear to “earn”
profits in other countries.

But how do we know this is what Clinton was talking about?

According to her platform, she will pay for increased infrastructure spending via some unspecified “business tax reform.” Despite promises back in December that she “will have more to say on her vision” about business tax reform, she’s been curiously silent.

However, when she met with the New York Daily News editorial board in April, she explained that the source of the infrastructure money “may be repatriation.”

Then there’s her statement this week that her infrastructure bank
would “will bring private sector dollars off the sidelines and put them
to work here.” That phrase — bringing corporate money “off the
sidelines” — is a favorite of both Democratic and Republican elites to
describe slashing the tax rate on overseas profits. For instance, Sen.
Marco Rubio, R-Fla., used it in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, as did economists writing for the New America Foundation, a liberal think tank.

That’s why Clinton can honestly predict that she will “break through
the dysfunction in Washington” and “work with both parties.” Both
parties want to deliver a massive tax cut to their huge corporate
patrons.